WASHINGTON — Across the Washington, D.C., border in the Commonwealth of Virginia there’s a tall, handsome young candidate for governor who stands as a sharp reflection of the problems eating through the heart of the Republican Party.

His name is Ken Cuccinelli and barring any unforeseen miracles, he’s about to lose big in his bid to be governor of this swing state.

The reason is clear. Women, blacks and even Republicans don’t like what the Democrats have successfully painted as his “radical extremism.”

His fiscal policies are all meat and potatoes Republicanism Republican. Cut the debt. Make social programs fiscally responsible. Nothing fancy there.

Then come the add-ons. He opposes gay marriage and once said the “homosexual agenda . . . brings nothing but self-destruction, not only physically but of their soul.” As state attorney general, he attempted to shut down Virginia’s abortion clinics and compared abortion to the “evil of slavery.” He opposes Obamacare claiming it violates freedom of choice and then supports a law to force pregnant women to have ultrasounds.

In a state that spends millions each year reinforcing its shoreline to protect cities such as Norfolk against the rising seas, Cuccinelli doesn’t believe in climate change and campaigns for coal. Also as attorney general, he tried to charge climate scientists at the University of Virginia with fraud.

Polls show he lags well behind his Democrat opponent. In a state where more than 22 per cent of workers get government pay cheques, his support of the government shutdown appears to have sealed his fate.

But Cuccinelli doesn’t care. “I don’t back down,” he said in a speech last year to Christian evangelists. “I’m not afraid to lose. What happens if I lose? I go home. I like going home.”

Tea Party followers, whose votes got him through the primaries, love his my-way-or-the-highway approach to politics. Most others don’t.

“He’s really not the crazed maniac we read about in the paper,” was the best Dave Albo, a Republican state delegate, could say about Cuccinelli in the Washington Post.

Republicans don’t like to admit it but politicians such as Cuccinelli are their new leaders. Theirs are the voices that America hears. Shrill, determined and negative. No to abortion. No to gun control. No to gay marriage. No to healthcare for the uninsured. No to legalization of illegal immigrants. No to lower interest rates on student loans. No, no, no. Behind it all might be sound fiscal thinking, but that’s not what Americans hear. It’s easy to demonize the Republicans as the Party of the ”No.”

“The demonization has been very ongoing and it’s very hard to come back from that,” Tim Hagle, a Republican and political scientist at the University of Iowa, said.

At the moment the party appears to be hanging by a tea-bag thread what with more moderate members castigating their own right-wing purists as “crazies,” “morons” and “lemmings with suicide vests.” The party is gobbling its young like finger food.

James Baker, former chief of staff to then-president Ronald Reagan, says the party’s message has to be more optimistic. “Americans responded when Ronald Reagan spoke about a shining city on the hill and when George H. W. Bush invoked ‘a thousand points of light,’ ” Baker wrote in the Weekend Financial Times.

He didn’t offer any suggestions. Perhaps because it’s hard to image that another Republican verbal light show would have much effect on a grassroots America that is being squeezed, even as wealth continues its upward flow. The top 20 per cent now owns 95 per cent of the country’s money. The lower 80 per cent work longer hours, earn less and are deeper in debt. To add insult to injury, they generally pay a higher tax rate than the rich.

Give the lower classes a break and show some fiscal responsibility. That was the original Tea Party message. Yet the Tea Party has been commandeered and eclipsed by the wealthy right — the oil baron Koch brothers, Charles and David, for example. Now it fights against action on the environment and opposes increased taxes on, you guessed it, the rich, which doesn’t exactly resonate with average Americans.

The Republicans may have to take another look at the message itself. But this poses a whole new problem that goes beyond issues of consistency. There are 80 Tea Party Republicans in the House and a good handful in the Senate, including leader Sen. Ted Cruz, who remain defiant and resolute. There will be no changing their “no” message — or the delivery. Force a new message on the party and you will be picking its glass shards off the floor.

Polls following the shutdown crisis delivered the first verdict on the Republican’s colossal failure. The Tea Party faction suffered the worst with its support dropping to an all-time low of 20 per cent.

But that is fleeting stuff. Next year’s midterms will be the true test of the party of Jefferson, Lincoln and Reagan.

“Normally you can expect the president’s party to lose seats in the mid-terms of a second term,” Hagle said. “If that doesn’t happen then that could bode trouble for the GOP not just in 2016 but even beyond.”